The Paulding County Airport Authority is planning for three projects to serve future growth and bring more safety to the airport.

Secretary Blake Swafford told the board at its June 17 meeting that bids for the extension of the runway safety area were to be received in last week.

“That project will take about three months,” he said.

The safety area is a part of the runway that helps reduce the risk of damage to an airplane if it undershoots or overshoots the landing area, according to the Federal Aviation Administration.

Officials plan to extend it by 600 feet.

Dirt for the project is coming from the construction site for the new Paulding fire station located near the airport terminal building.

Construction is slated to start around September for the widening of the taxiway parallel to the runway from the current 35 feet to 50 feet.

The projects are federally funded.

Also Swafford said they hope to start construction on the new county fire station by Nov. 1.

“Plans are about 90 percent complete,” he said.

Bids should be taken for the project in mid-August.

In other action, the authority voted to create a technology committee. It appointed Jason Summerour as the chair and authority member Jim Underwood and county Technology Director Will Lyons as committee members.

Summerour is the director of software engineering at the Weather Channel. He and his team are responsible for computer servers which distribute weather data to weather.com, mobile applications and third party vendors.

Authority member Kerry Tidmore said in the past the airport has had partnerships with the county and the Paulding County Industrial Building Authority for technology service.

“We have never had a dedicated IT person,” he said. “We have discovered we have a need as we grow.”

Summerour will be volunteering his time to the authority. He said he wants to serve and invest his time to be able to help the community.

He already acquired the domain name for the airport’s website, pauldingairport.com, which was previously owned by a company the authority had worked with.

“[I am] going to do an entire revamp [of the website] over the next couple of months,” Summerour said.

He said he plans to make the website more user friendly and make it easier for authority members to post material on the site.

Also Summerour will upload training modules and material to the website, and will be able to track who has taken the training. He will have alerts set up on when employees’ training expires.

“They needed this on the website to have it readily accessible,” he said.

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